The Stories of Richard Bausch (23 page)

He experienced a sudden rush of aversion.

There was something almost cartoonish about the pallor of her face, and he couldn’t bring himself to settle his eyes on her. As she walked into his arms, he took a breath and tried to keep from screaming, and then he heard himself telling her it was all right, it was over.

But of course it wasn’t over.

The police wanted statements from everyone, and their names and addresses. This was something that was going to go on, Michael knew. They were going to look at it from every angle, this traffic altercation that had ended in violence and caused the two men involved to be wounded. The policemen were calling the wounds out to each other. “This one’s in the hip,” one of them said, and another answered, “Abdomen, here.” It was difficult at first to tell who was involved and who was a bystander. The traffic had backed up for blocks, and people were coming out of the buildings lining the street.

There was a slow interval of a kind of deep concentration, a stillness, while the police and the paramedics worked. The ambulances took the wounded men away, and a little while later the police cars began to pull out, too. The Blakelys sat in the back of one of the squad cars while a polite officer asked them questions. The officer had questioned ten or eleven others, he told them—as though they had not been standing around waiting during this procedure—and now he explained in his quiet, considerate baritone
voice that he had to get everybody’s best recollection of the events. He hoped they understood.

“I don’t really know what was said, or what happened,” Michael told him. “I don’t have the slightest idea, okay? Like I said, we didn’t know anything was happening until we heard the gunshots.”

“We saw the scuffling,” Ivy said. “Remember?”

“I just need to get the sequence of events down,” the officer said.

“We saw the scuffle,” said Ivy. “Or I saw it. I was reading this magazine—”

“Look, it was a fight,” Michael broke in. “Haven’t you got enough from all these other people? We didn’t know what was happening.”

“Well, sir—after you realized there was gunfire, what did you do?”

Michael held back, glanced at his wife and waited.

She seemed surprised for a second. “Oh. I—I got down on the front seat of the car. I had a magazine I was reading, and I put it up to my face, like—like this.” She pantomimed putting the magazine to her face. “I think that’s what I did.”

“And you?” the policeman said to Michael.

“I don’t even remember.”

“You got out of the car,” said his wife, in the tone of someone who has made a discovery. “You—you left me there.”

“I thought you were with me,” he said.

The policeman, a young man with deep-socketed eyes and a toothy white smile, closed his clipboard and said, “Well, you never know where anybody is at such a time, everything gets so confused.”

Ivy stared at her husband. “No, but you left me there. Where were you going, anyway?”

“I thought you were with me,” he said.

“You didn’t look back to see if I was?”

He couldn’t answer her.

The policeman was staring at first one and then the other, and seemed about to break out laughing. But when he spoke, his voice was soft and very considerate. “It’s a hard thing to know where everybody was when there’s trouble like this, or what anybody had in mind.”

Neither Michael nor his wife answered him.

“Well,” he went on, “I guess I’ve got all I need.”

“Will anyone die?” Ivy asked him.

He smiled. “I think they got things under control.”

“Then no one’s going to die?”

“I don’t think so. They got some help pretty quick, you know—Mr. Vance, over there, is a doctor, and he stepped right in and started working on them. Small-caliber pistols in both cases, thank God—looks like everybody’s gonna make it.”

Michael felt abruptly nauseous and dizzy. The officer was looking at him.

“Can you have someone wash the blood off our car?” Ivy asked.

“Oh, Jesus,” Michael said.

The officer seemed concerned. “You look a little green around the gills, sir. You could be in a little shock. Wait here.” He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked over to where a group of officers and a couple of paramedics were standing, on the other side of the street. In the foreground, another officer was directing traffic. Michael stared out at this man, and felt as though there wasn’t any breathable air. He searched for a way to open his window. His wife sat very still at his side, staring at her hands.

“Stop sighing like that,” she said suddenly. “You’re safe.”

“You heard the officer,” he told her. “I could be in shock. I can’t breathe.”

“You’re panting.”

In the silence that followed, a kind of whimper escaped from the bottom of his throat.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Will you please cut that out.”

She saw the
officer coming back, and she noted the perfect crease of his uniform slacks. Her husband was a shape to her left, breathing.

“Ivy?” he said.

The officer opened the door and leaned in. “Doctor’ll give you a look,” he said, across her, to Michael.

“I’m okay,” Michael said.

“Well,” said the officer. “Can’t hurt.”

They got out, and he made sure of their address. He said he had someone washing the blood from their car. Michael seemed to lean into him, and Ivy walked away from them, out into the street. The policeman there told
her to wait. People were still crowding along the sidewalk on that side, and a woman sat on the curb, crying, being tended to by two others. The sun was still bright; it shone in the dark hair of the crying woman. Ivy made her way to the sidewalk, and when she turned she saw that the polite officer was helping Michael across. The two men moved to the knot of paramedics, and the doctor who had been the man of the hour took Michael by the arms and looked into his face. The doctor was rugged-looking, with thick, wiry brown hair, heavy square features, and big rough-looking hands—a man who did outdoor things, and was calm, in charge, perhaps five years older than Michael, though he seemed almost fatherly with him. He got Michael to sit down, then lie down, and he elevated his legs. Michael lay in the middle of the sidewalk with a crate of oranges under his legs, which someone had brought from the deli a few feet away. Ivy walked over there and waited with the others, hearing the muttered questions bystanders asked—was this one of the victims?

The doctor knelt down and asked Michael how he felt.

“Silly,” Michael said.

“Well. You got excited. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Can I get up now?”

“Think you can?”

“Yes, sir.”

The doctor helped him stand. A little smattering of approving sounds went through the crowd. Michael turned in a small circle and located his wife. He looked directly at her, and then looked away. She saw this, and waited where she was. He was talking to the doctor, nodding. Then he came toward her, head down, like a little boy, she thought, a little boy ashamed of himself.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They walked down the street, to where the car had been moved. Someone had washed the blood from it, though she could see traces of it in the aluminum trim along the door. She got in and waited for him to make his way around to the driver’s side. When he got in, she arranged herself, smoothing her dress down, not looking at him. He started the engine, pulled out carefully into traffic. It was still slow going, three lanes moving fitfully toward the bridge. They were several blocks down the street before he spoke.

“Doctor said I had mild shock.”

“I saw.”

They reached the bridge, and then they were stopped there, with a view of the water, and the rest of the city ranged along the river’s edge—a massive, uneven shape of buildings with flame in every window, beyond the sparkle of the water. The sun seemed to be pouring into the car.

He reached over and turned the air-conditioning off. “We’ll overheat,” he said.

“Can you leave it on a minute?” she asked.

He rolled his window down. “We’ll overheat.”

She reached over and put it on, and leaned into it. The air was cool, blowing on her face, and she closed her eyes. She had chosen too easily when she chose him. She could feel the rightness of the thought as it arrived; she gave in to it, accepted it, with a small, bitter rush of elation and anger. The flow of cool air on her face stopped. He had turned it off.

“I just thought I’d run it for a minute,” she said.

He turned it on again. She leaned forward, took a breath, then turned it off. “That’s good.” She imagined herself going on with her life, making other choices; she was relieved to be alive, and she felt exhilarated. The very air seemed sweeter. She saw herself alone, or with someone else, some friend to whom she might tell the funny story of her young husband running off and leaving her to her fate in the middle of a gun battle.

But in the next instant, the horror of it reached through her and made her shudder, deep. “God,” she murmured.

He said nothing. The traffic moved a few feet, then seemed to start thinning out. He idled forward, then accelerated slowly.

“Mind the radio?” she said.

He thought she seemed slightly different with him now, almost superior. He remembered how it felt to be lying in the middle of the sidewalk with the orange crate under his legs. When he spoke, he tried to seem neutral. “Pardon me?”

“I asked if you mind the radio.”

“Up to you,” he said.

“Well, what do you want.”

“Radio’s fine.”

She turned it on. She couldn’t help the feeling that this was toying with
him, a kind of needling. Yet it was a pleasant feeling. The news was on; they listened for a time.

“It’s too early, I guess,” she said.

“Too early for what?”

“I thought it might be on the news.” She waited a moment. The traffic was moving; they were moving. She put the air-conditioning on again, and sat there with the air fanning her face, eyes closed. She felt him watching her, and she had begun to feel guilty—even cruel. They had, after all, both been frightened out of their wits. He was her husband, whom she loved. “Let me know if you think I ought to turn it off again.”

“I said we’d overheat,” he said.

She only glanced at him. “We’re moving now. It’s okay if we’re moving, right?” Then she closed her eyes and faced into the cool rush of air.

He looked at her, sitting there with her eyes closed, basking in the coolness as if nothing at all had happened. He wanted to tell her about Saul Dornby’s wife. He tried to frame the words into a sentence that might make her wonder what his part in all that might be—but the thing sounded foolish to him:
Saul, at work, makes me answer his wife’s phone calls. He’s sleeping around on her. I’ve been going to sleep at night dreaming about what it might be like if I got to know her a little better.

“If it’s going to cause us to overheat, I’ll turn it off,” she said.

He said nothing.

Well, he could pout if he wanted to. He was the one who had run away and left her to whatever might happen. She thought again how it was that someone might have shot into the car while she cringed there alone. “Do you want me to turn it off?” she said.

“Leave it be,” he told her.

They were quiet, then, all the way home. She gazed out the front, at the white lines coming at them and at them. He drove slowly, and tried to think of something to say to her, something to explain everything in some plausible way.

She noticed that there was still some blood at the base of her window. Some of it had seeped down between the door and the glass. When he pulled into the drive in front of the house, she waited for him to get out, then slid across the seat and got out behind him.

“They didn’t get all the blood,” she said.

“Jesus.” He went up the walk toward the front door.

“I’m not going to clean it,” she said.

“I’ll take it to the car wash.”

He had some trouble with the key to the door. He cursed under his breath, and finally got it to work. They walked through the living room to their bedroom, where she got out of her clothes, and was startled to find that some blood had got on the arm of her blouse.

“Look at this,” she said. She held it out for him to see.

“I see.”

The expression on her face, that cocky little smile, made him want to strike her. He suppressed the urge, and went about changing his own clothes. He was appalled at the depth of his anger.

“Can you believe it?” she said.

“Please,” he said. “I’d like to forget the whole thing.”

“I know, but look.”

“I see it. What do you want me to do with it?”

“Okay,” she said. “I just thought it was something—that it got inside the window somehow. It got on my arm.”

“Get it out of here,” he said. “Put it away.”

She went into the bathroom and threw the blouse into the trash. Then she washed her face and hands and got out of her skirt, her stockings. “I’m going to take a shower,” she called to him. He didn’t answer, so she went to the entrance of the living room, where she found him watching the news.

“Is it on?” she asked.

“Is what on?”

“Okay. I’m going to take a shower.”

“Ivy,” he said.

She waited. She kept her face as impassive as possible.

“I’m really sorry. I did think you were with me, that we were running together, you know.”

It occurred to her that if she allowed him to, he would turn this into the way he remembered things, and he would come to believe it was so. She could give this to him, simply by accepting his explanation of it all. In the same instant something hot rose up in her heart, and she said, “But you didn’t look back to see where I was.” She said this evenly, almost cheerfully.

“Because I thought you were there. Right behind me. Don’t you see?”

The pain in his voice was weirdly far from making her feel sorry. She said, “I could’ve been killed, though. And you wouldn’t have known it.”

He said nothing. He had the thought that this would be something she might hold over him, and for an instant he felt the anger again, wanted to make some motion toward her, something to shake her, as he had been shaken. “Look,” he said.